NEW YORK, NEW YORK—According to a statement released by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the United States has recently repatriated a group of 43 artifacts to Turkey. The objects include a life-size bronze statue known as the “Nude Emperor,” which had been stolen from south-central Turkey’s ancient site of Bubon, along with many other objects, in the 1960s. Agents traced the Bubon artifacts from Turkey, to Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and then on to dealers, collectors, and museums in the United States and other European countries. “The looting into ancient sites like Bubon were extensive, and I am pleased that our investigation has yielded such significant results,” said District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. A second-century A.D. marble Roman sculpture of the Greek orator and politician Demosthenes, illegally unearthed in western Turkey, was recovered from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and also repatriated. The rest of the objects in the group are 41 terracotta plaques taken from a sixth-century B.C. Phrygian temple in Düver, in south-central Turkey. These artifacts had been held in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, but curator Michael Taylor contacted New York’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit when he saw that a plaque similar to those in his museum’s collection had been seized by law enforcement. To read about terracotta figurines of Greek deities unearthed in southwestern Turkey, go to "Artemis, Apollo, and Friends."
